DIY Button Thumbtacks

There's an exam on friday, looks like a good time to do crafts! 

These button thumbtacks were very fun and easy to do!

 

What you Need:

- Buttons!

- Cheap thumbtacks

- Glue gun and glue

Get Gluing!

This is easy! Just put a blob of glue on the thumbtack and stick a button to it! I tried doing them upside down but the glue oozes out the button holes and it doesn't look as good... so just let them dry on an angle to preserve the button hole glue blebs!

I got the buttons and the tacks for <$4 at the Wal-Mart! 

 Hope you enjoyed this quick and easy project!

52 Things...

It's almost Valentine's day again! I was completely lost on gift ideas this year, and I wanted to do something a little more meaningful anyway. I stumbled across this "52 things I love about you" book on Pinterest a few years ago and decided to finally give it a shot! Turns out it's not too tough to come up with 52 things that I love about Greg!

Here is the finished project!

This deck is WICKED thick, too - probably three times the size of a normal deck of cards after the addition of all of the cardstock pages! 

What You'll Need:

- Scissors

- A hole punch (not pictured)

- A deck of cards

- Red cardstock - I chose a shades of red variety pack

- Sharpie markers

- Packing tape

- Double sided tape 

- Ribbon

Step #1 - Punching 54 cards...

I used a single hole punch but I'm sure you could get away with the three-hole punch, it would probably just take longer. I didn't measure - I just eyeballed it. I tried to punch out the mermaid tails on the cards on one edge so that each card was more or less the same. I punched the standard 52 card deck on the left side and also punched the 2 jokers to be the front and back covers of the deck. 

Punches located over "mermaid tails" of the corner guys. I actually don't know if these are mermaids, but it doesn't really matter anyway... haha

Step #2 - Cutting Out your Paper

No picture of this.. but I took different shades of the cardstock and cut them down into ~1.5x2.5" rectangles so that they would cover most of the inner rectangle of the card. This will make more sense when you see the pictures in step 4. This was pretty time consuming but went faster with tunes and wine handy ;). 

Step #3 - Writing out 52 Things...

The cover title I chose was "52 things that I love about you" - then over three days I came up with a list of 52 things I love about my boyfriend Greg. Some of them are serious, some are funny, and some are things about him that I find attractive/admirable. I threw in a couple of vet school ones, too, since that is my entire life right now! Then I wrote all of these out onto the little rectangles of paper I cut out!

Here are some examples...

Yes... I ACTUALLY am using this one! Loving someone who has been rectaling cows all day is the truest test of love, right?!?! 

Step #4 - Attaching Your 52 Things to Cards..

I used a piece of double-sided tape to get the pieces of paper pretty much stuck and then went over the card with a piece of packing tape. I like the glossy appearance that's left over by the packing tape, and it makes it stick better; the cards are so slippery even double sided tape has a tough time sticking. You could probably use glue to get them to stick as well, but I thought this would be easiest. 

Only 51 more to go!!!

Step #5 - Put your Deck together!

One piece of ribbon, flat at the back and thru both holes - double knot and then a bow! All done! The deck is a lot thicker than it looks here - probably three times the size of a normal deck of cards! 

And that's it! I hope Greg likes it! I sure am excited to give it to him :). Hope you enjoyed this post, too!

The Great Gingerbread Farm

A month later this post is finally here! Oh wait, is that because there's an exam in two days.... ;)

This year my mom told me she wanted to do a gingerbread replica of our house during my winter break. This seemed like a great idea until we realized how much flour we needed to accomplish this task. Let alone how many pieces we would have to cut to even make the task feasible (we live in a cape). Instead, we settled on a gingerbread farm! Here is the finished product below:

 

This isn't really going to be a tutorial since there are so many different ways to decorate, but I wanted to blog about it just to share how fun the project was!

Design
I used printer paper and traced out pieces that we could put on our dough for templates. I'm sorry I don't have a printable template... I am definitely not technically advanced enough to get that thing on the computer... haha. There are a few gingerbread farm blog posts out there though and a few do have printable templates!

Dough and Icing
The recipe for the dough we used can be found here. I know it's not true gingerbread since there's no ginger in it but we needed something that would harden so we can keep this thing for a few years. The recipe calls for dark or light corn syrup but we were short on both so we combined dark and light. We made the dough three days ago and it is like a freaking brick. You could probably break somebody's face with it haha. 

The frosting is similarly stiff; the recipe for that can be found here. The recipe calls for meringue powder which you can find in the cake decorating section of the Wal-Mart, but if you can't find it you can substitute egg whites (because that's really what it is anyway). 

Supposedly you're supposed to use gel food coloring so it doesn't dilute out the icing but we kinda missed that memo and used the liquid drops you can find in the spice aisle of your grocery store. 

To make the barn red we added a ton of red food coloring to a small bowl of white icing until it was as dark as we wanted. Then we took a paint brush - yes, a paint brush - and painted it onto the front, back, and sides of the barn as well as the pieces for the cupola and the chicken coop. It actually dried a lot darker than we expected which was nice.

Note - Most of the stuff on this house we intended to be non-edible so we could store it and take it out for years to come!

Photos and Decorations! 

Our template:

Assembly!

The finished roof! Made out of frosted mini-wheats.

Making Decorations while the roof sets.. The wreathes were made with circular pieces of cardboard and a leaf cake decorating tip. The pearls are edible sugar. The trees were made on sugar cones that we cut down to different sizes and then used a star tip on! The belted Galloway was made with a cookie cutter and colored frosting.

After addition of the snow and all the decorations!

Hope you enjoyed this as much as we did!